Although Apple was his most recent employer, Stasior actually left the company in May. Stasior will now join Microsoft later this month as corporate vice president and will report to CTO Kevin Scott.

Stasior worked at Apple for almost a decade. Having also held the positions of director of search and navigation at Amazon, director of advanced development at AltaVista, senior developer at Oracle Corporation, and researcher and developer at MIT, Stasior brings a vast amount of experience to Microsoft.

Of course, Microsoft’s hiring of Stasior from Apple is all part of the Silicon Valley talent trading. For example, Apple stole Google’s former head of search and AI, John Giannandrea, last year to oversee Cupertino’s machine learning and AI strategy.

Under Giannandrea, Apple has been revamping its AI strategy not just with Siri but across the company’s products. During WWDC earlier this year, Apple announced the ML Core 13 framework which is the first to support both inference and training directly on-device.

However, Siri has been making significant improvements under Giannandrea’s leadership. In an article yesterday, AI News reported on an IQ test by Loup Ventures. While behind Google Assistant, Siri was in second place ahead of Alexa with 83.1 percent of questions answered correctly.

Apple has long been seen as at a disadvantage in AI due to its strict stance on protecting user privacy. While admirable, AI requires large amounts of data to be trained on. Time will tell if Apple can compete with the likes of Google in the long-term.

Microsoft has also been changing its own AI strategy. Back in January, Microsoft said that it’s no longer attempting to compete with Alexa or Google Assistant in areas like smart speakers with Cortana but instead will reposition the AI assistant more like a skill that can be embedded in services.

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Published by UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization), the 146-page report titled “I’d blush if I could” highlights the market is dominated by female voice assistants.

According to the researchers, the almost exclusive use of female voice assistants fuels stereotypes that women are “obliging, docile and eager-to-please helpers”.

The researchers also believe the lack of mannerisms required in speaking to current virtual assistants is also problematic. They claim the fact a virtual assistant will respond to requests no matter how it’s asked reinforces the idea women are “subservient and tolerant of poor treatment” in some communities.

Similarly, the fact virtual assistants can be summoned with just a “touch of a button or with a blunt voice command like ‘hey’ or ‘OK’,” makes it appear like women are available on demand.

Most virtual assistants use female voices by default but offer a male option. Technology giants such as Amazon and Apple have in the past said consumers prefer female voices for their assistants, with an Amazon spokesperson recently attributing these voices with more “sympathetic and pleasant” traits.

The report highlights virtual assistants are predominantly created with male engineering teams. Some cases even found assistants “thanking users for sexual harassment”, and that sexual advances from male users were tolerated more than from female users.

Siri was found to respond “provocatively to sexual favours” from male users, with phrases such as: “I’d blush if I could” (hence the report’s title) and “Oooh!”, but would do so less towards women.

The lack of ability for female voice assistants to defend themselves from sexist and hostile insults “may highlight her powerlessness,” claims the report. Such coding “projects a digitally encrypted ‘boys will be boys’ attitude” that “may help biases to take hold and spread”.

In a bid to help tackle the issue, the UN believes gender-neutral and non-human voices should be used. The researchers point towards Stephen Hawking’s famous robotic voice as one such example.

Alexa, Google Assistant, and Cortana all use female voices by default. Siri uses a male voice in Arabic, British English, Dutch, and French.

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In the company’s annual report for the 2017 fiscal year, AI is now mentioned on six occasions. Compared to not a single mention in the previous report, it’s clear Microsoft is now putting more of its focus on artificial intelligence.

Microsoft also indicates this in their corporate vision statement: “Our strategic vision is to compete and grow by building best-in-class platforms and productivity services for an intelligent cloud and an intelligent edge infused with AI.”

AI is only just starting to get real momentum (hence why this very publication has been launched, hello!) but it seems to be another case of where the company has slumbered, and that’s incredibly frustrating because it has much to contribute.

Microsoft is in a very advantageous position to lead in AI. First off, it has Bing. While it doesn’t have anywhere near the user numbers of Google’s search engine, it has been crawling the world’s information and building a vast knowledge graph since it launched back in 2009. This is a valuable resource and it’s only Google in the western world that’s able to compete.

When you include eastern markets, then Baidu, China’s largest search engine, is also in a similar position. Google and Baidu are considered world leaders in AI, and their search engine backgrounds are part of the reason why.

Microsoft also has the talent. Rivals including Apple and Facebook have poached some of it, but there’s good reason. Microsoft is full of it. In fact, Microsoft is the biggest supplier of AI talent to Facebook, Amazon, and Google. The company should’ve looked at why their employees were heading elsewhere long ago, I’d wager it was a lack of momentum compared to rivals.

Finally, Microsoft has the users. Whether it’s enterprises using Azure, employees, and students on Windows, or even gamers on Xbox… the company has legions of people already using their products who could benefit from AI.

Ok, it’s not like Microsoft has been completely absent from AI, the company even has a fairly capable personal assistant with Cortana which in tests is only second to Google in its ability to understand and correctly answer general questions. Compared to Siri and Alexa, Cortana is ahead by a wide margin in this regard.

But while others have been advancing their capabilities rapidly, Cortana has stagnated. Today it’s the only assistant which is unable to control smart home devices.

When the Xbox One was launched, the console was marketed as being the one entertainment center for your home. Whether you wanted games, videos, TV, or music, you were supposed to find it on the “always on” Xbox. Microsoft missed a huge opportunity to make the Xbox the center of your smart home and give people a reason to want Kinect, a device which has seemingly become the perfect metaphor for Microsoft – impressive, yet often missing the mark.

Last year, Microsoft set up a dedicated research group for artificial intelligence reporting to Harry Shum, Vice President of Artificial Intelligence & Research, which consists of 7,500 scientists, researchers, and engineers from its product teams. The group’s purpose is to speed up Microsoft’s AI development and become as active in the community as the likes of Google, IBM, and Amazon.

A new research and incubation hub called Microsoft Research AI has also been set up within its research labs unit to work on solving problems associated with AI. Part of this work is to unite research in currently disparate areas such as deep learning, machine perception, and natural language processing. By integrating these disciplines, Microsoft believes it will cause the next technology breakthroughs, such as machine reading.

This is applaudable, but not if like a lot of Microsoft’s best work it just sits in a research lab. At least to help settle the concerns about AI going rogue the company has set up the Aether ethics advisory board alongside Google, Facebook, and Amazon.

As for the importance of AI, I’d go as far as to suggest there are similarities between the AI race and two of humankind’s most defining moments. The space race, and the nuclear arms race. The former was mostly about bragging rights, while the latter was a show of deadly capability to potential opponents.

China’s strict censorship and its ‘great firewall’ is renowned but earlier this year it went a step further when the nation blocked streams of Google’s AlphaMind AI beating the country’s Go champion. While usual sports broadcasts go uninterrupted, it was clear there was a political motive behind the decision to block the competition.

As we reported earlier this week, most cybersecurity experts believe AI will be weaponised over the course of the next 12 months. Whether by individual or state-sponsored hackers, the race is on for governments to match and/or exceed those capabilities. That is the dark side of AI no-one likes to discuss, but today’s battlefield is increasingly digital, and governments will be looking to weaponise AI.

That is the importance of AI, and it’s good to see Microsoft finally putting their full weight behind it, even if it should have been much sooner.

Are you looking forward to Microsoft focusing its efforts on AI?

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